Page 22 of We Were Eternal Once

No—but it is important to the story. Without this timetable I will forget something, I will misplace an event. I cannot do that, because it will create doubt. And you love to sink your teeth into doubt and weakness.

I won’t let you feast on me now, I’ve grown too strong for you.

(“Rome, then. Claudius. Nero. The Four Emperors.”)

Yes, that is right.

The cacophony of a city will never compare to Rome during those days. Fires, feasts, famine, and wealth. You promised me a life of beauty and excess, to never want for anything. That was Rome for us.

Below us, the poor churned in their own refuse, living on top of each other, rooms no larger than a barn stall. The streets ran with feces and sewage, ground into the unpaved streets by the movement of the working class.

Even the stench of the poor could not reach us in our domus. By day, we slept in a home with running water and a separate room for eating. By night, we attended the spectacles of law, joining denizens as we heckled those who sought justice in the public forum.

Sometimes the weight of the past was forgotten. On nights where we lounged on our balcony and looked over the city below, where we fed and fucked multiple times a night, I could almost forget what I’d done. But there was always a passing comment by you to remind me.

My cardinal sin wasn’t nearly getting us killed. It was turning my devotion away from you and onto myself.

I thanked you for the reminders and humility then. I promised if we lived, I would spend every day of our lives making it up to you. I would return to that place of devotion. I would realign myself with what it meant to be loved by you, and to love you.

It was easy when life was easy and beautiful and diverse. I honed my Latin until no one knew I was Greek. Your accent remained unplaceable, and only added to the allure.

Then I met another vampire.

How was it that we went so many decades and centuries without finding another of us? There were mentions of our kind, silly rumors and tales spun by the humans. Demons that ate babies, creatures that feasted on blood or organs, immortal beings that can’t see the sun without turning to ash.

I thought they were about you. You, both ageless and ancient, having wandered the world for time unknown. You, who knew of languages and cities and civilizations I’d never heard of.

(“Books are not a novel concept.”)

No, but the breadth of your knowledge spoke of lived experience. The way you navigated us across lands without maps. Your stories of caution, of never befriending a human, of not staying in one place too long…I thought they were lessons learned from previous folly.

Then I watched a young man sink his teeth into the neck of a woman in the shadows of the street while a woman lapped from her open wrist.

You didn’t notice at first. This is the part of the memory that always shocks me. You noticed things before me—always. Your senses were more attuned to the night, your instincts sharper. You moved through the streets without a sideways glance down the alley as the human gurgled her last breath as though it was nothing.

But I did.

My eyes burned into the man on her neck, at the way he drank her down, his fingers digging into the supple flesh of her arm. You noticed I’d stopped moments later, following my gaze down that dirty alley.

My mind struggled for words. Your mouth turned down in a frown of disgust. Over what? The public nature of it? How they were too enthralled to notice us?

The woman on her knees caught my eye and stared. Her eyes were a deep purple, just as unnatural as our red eyes. They glowed in the depths of the alley like two embers, tracking our every move. She coiled around her shared prey as though to pounce, her every muscle taut with anticipation.

I stepped into the alley just as your fingers closed over the space where my wrist was.

“She’s ours,” growled the woman. Her dirty clothes had dried bloodstains around the hem. The man’s head jerked up at her voice, his purple eyes glancing over me to you.

“I know,” I said, taking another step into the alley. “You are like us.” It was a question, a marvel, a declaration. It was not like in the temple, where I was in the presence of a goddess. It was not like at day where I curled into our shared grave, my body fitting into yours until there was no space between us.

This was the feeling of discovery, of hope, of something new.

Since I drowned, I’d tried to push away the boredom that clawed at me. I learned a new language, I read another book, I questioned you about a land or a culture. I stole a horse to learn to ride it, I stole a sword to learn to heft it. Every few years I enlisted my hands in a new hobby, just to discard it when it no longer brought me joy. It was all in earnest, to stave away the chasm that opened in my belly.

The chasm that whispered for me to get on a boat and leave.

Instead, we moved again, traveled to a different land, slunk around the edges of taverns to listen to how the humans lived.

At last, a remedy to the illness that made me commission a man to build a box over a century prior.